Don Benedetto

In a vast, 16th Century palazzo in the heart of Naples lives a stubby, stooped old man whom Neapolitans call "Don Benedetto." Though he is in his 80s, the old man ordinarily rises at 6, and an hour later trudges into his book-lined study to write at his big desk or to sit in his big armchair, thinking. Occasionally Neapolitans see him out strolling, passing dilapidated palaces and ancient churches, to his favorite bookshop on the Via Foria for a bout of friendly dickering. But last week Neapolitans were troubled: out of the palazzo had come the news that Philosopher Benedetto Croce was gravely ill.

Up & down Italy, newspapers carried the alarm: the old philosopher had collapsed. His daughter had rushed to his bedside, and so had such friends as Alessandro Casati, a leader of the Liberal Party, and Enrico de Nicola, ex-President of the republic. For two days Italians waited, then breathed with relief. Philosopher Croce had called for his manuscripts, said he wanted to get back to work. Though his doctors insisted that he keep on resting, they thought that for the present the danger was over.

A Single Glance. Thus, this week, Benedetto Croce approached his 84th birthday --an age, as he put it, "when a man's life seems a past that he can survey at a single glance." As scholars all over the world well knew, that glance included much.

Long before Italians ever heard the name of Benito Mussolini, they had begun to know Benedetto Croce. He was the wealthy aristocrat with the bristly hair who was to become not only Italy's most noted 20th Century philosopher, but a senator and a cabinet minister as well.

In the first months of Fascism, he was slow to realize what Mussolini stood for. But when dictatorship established itself, he turned his back on Rome. In Naples, he edited a scholarly anti-Fascist magazine called La Critica, defied the government with his book History as the Story of Liberty. Once a band of young Black Shirts threatened to storm his home, fled when confronted by Signora Croce. Beyond that, the Fascists never dared to molest the Croces. "There is one man in all Italy whom I fear," Mussolini once remarked--"Croce. And I fear him because I do not understand him."

A Sigh of Relief. Other Italians understood him better. After the fall of Mussolini, they called Croce back into public life once more in Marshal Badoglio's cabinet. But his appearance was a brief one. With a sigh of relief he left public office for good, and went back home to a library that reached ladder-high ("How can a man live without books?"), and to a special Italian Institute of Historical Studies which he had long wanted to found.

Since then his palazzo has been filled with students. They browse through his library at will, sometimes approach Il Maestro with a question. Such interruptions are welcome. "For so many years under Fascism," Croce says, "not a single student came to me with his problems."

What Lies Beyond? The institute is a symbol of all the problems that Benedetto Croce has himself wrestled with. Years ago, as the erudite young man of the Rome salons, he found himself "suddenly nauseated by all this erudition. I knew facts and events. But what was the point of it all?" In trying to find the point, he was to build up his own system of thought and his own definition of the function of philosophy.

Croce had written warmly and feelingly of the history of other men's faith, but at 83 he was still an agnostic. Like the pragmatists, he held that the philosopher had no business delving into the supernatural: "Man can only know that which he has experienced. He may believe, but he cannot know what lies beyond." What he could know was history--not a history of unique moments, but of time that flows without end. In Croce's philosophy, history, the only reality, is the unfolding of the human spirit itself, and experience the only test of truth--a detached point of view that undoubtedly explained Liberal Croce's relative slowness in divining Mussolini's course.

In the Croce interpretation, philosophy is no more than a method of history, and it was that method which Croce's students studied while Don Benedetto padded about them, ready to answer their questions. He believed that they could hope to find no final truths: "No philosophical system is ever final, for life itself is never final." But as men live, he thinks, they come upon new fragments of truth, and each fragment must be placed in the ever-changing universal scheme. "So it has ever been," says Benedetto Croce, "and so it will ever be."

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